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Half-Life 2 Finally Activated
Thomas Scovell writes "After over half a decade of development, stolen source code debacle, a promised deadline that was missed by a year, and a feud between the developer and the publisher that is still in court, Half-Life 2 has finally started to activate for those who have purchased online via Steam online or who grabbed the boxed version at the retailers that let it slip early. Go play!" Reviews are available via Gamespot, Gamespy, HomeLAN Fed, and IGN.
I've seen a number of reviews say that Half-Life 2 is the best FPS of all time. After playing it even for only the hour that I have (I have a Social Psychology mid-term tomorrow morning ;), I can tell you that it is, hands down.
I have to commend Valve for doing it right. They didn't rush. They didn't over-hype. They didn't fuck it up. =)
I believe Valve deserves a round of applause. Half-Life 2 is a masterpiece.
*Applause*
You still can't play it without connecting to steam during the installation.
I remember all the previews and special edition magazines that had the same theme, "Who will come out on top: Halo 2, Doom 3, or Hal-Life 2?"
To be honest, I was rooting for Half-Life 2. I always respected Valve's commitment to their community in their support of their game(s). Halo 2 was more of the same (yet somehow more fun than the first). Doom 3 was pretty, but had the personality of a tray of ice cubes.
I guess what I am trying to say in my own biased way, is, I'm glad I was backing Half-Life 2. So far I am not disappointed.
And by the way, has anyone noticed the excessive use of exploding barrels yet? It's like City 17 is a giant nitro nitro plant and they can't seem to keep track of the product.
Been playing it for the last 2 hours, simply Amazing.
;)
AMD 2600/ATI 9700PRO and I'm getting 60-100FPS with 2X AA, at 1024x768. Smooth as silk, fast, and great.
Only problem, Its a tube chaser so far, just run and run and run. But damn if it dont look amazing.
BTW, she looks cute in those Jeans, Good job Valve..
Strange, the Steam Status says their using less then half their available bandwidth. Maybe its just a really big download?
So mygame kept crashing loading the very first level. I wanted to cry. Not knowing what to do, I did the only geek thing I could think of: I simply posted my tears on Shacknews. But within minutes a Valve guy showed up asking if he could help. Then Erik Johnson himself popped in and started troubleshooting. I practically had Valve guys fighting over who could help me fix the problem first. And all this at like 2am in the morning. That's some pretty sweet support kids: they tracked ME down instead of me having to beg them to help.
$29.99 seems fairer. That's $29.99 of money that goes to Valve as opposed to the $8 or whatever it is that goes with the retail version. Everyone wins except the legacy distributors - Valve because they get 4-5x the profit, the customer because they get the game for less.
Okay, so there are some distribution issues surrounding online downloads, but these can largely be mitigated with P2P. For example World of Warcraft uses a (very sucky) custom Bittorrent client to download the game. I have no idea what the savings are for distributing via a .torrent but I can well imagine that bandwidth consumption is slashed to 1/50th.
Expecting people to pay what they could reasonably expect to pay in the stores, is a non-starter as far as I'm concerned. Norton / Symantec do something similar.
As an aside, the WoW custom torrent app is so abysmally slow (as in broken slow) and requires various open ports, that I followed the advice I found somewhere, and split the .torrent out of the executable to download through a normal BT client. It was about 5 times faster.
I'm sure there are elements of the contract with Vivendi that prohibit Valve undercutting the retail price when distributing via steam.
The same type of restrictions stopped valve from activating clients purchased via Steam before the in-store release date
However, that doesn't stop me disagreeing with the previous poster about the price of the game.
I personally think that $49.99 is a pretty good price for a game like this irrespective of the distribution medium.
Water looks sweet, but the humans look a bit flat compared with the dynamic shadowy bump-mapped goodness of Doom 3.
Maybe I'm just biased because this bloody game is Windows-only.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
actually I think the half-life humans look like crap. It's their skin - there's no pores and it's too smooth. Doom 3 did a whole lot better representing humans, though there wasn't many of them.
However, I haven't played the game, and if the animations are done properly it may account for the bad texturing.